Noah Baumbach Proves in While We’re Young That Getting Old Sucks. But Does It Have To?

This Sunday, HBO’s series Boardwalk Empire returns for the last time. After three seasons spent in the roaring 20s, the fourth and final one jumps an astonishing seven years forward in time to bring us to 1931. The change is somewhat alarming: some regular characters won’t even be around this season. But it’s also only one of many time jumps we’ve seen on television this year. In fact, the time jump has become so prevalent it’s become a bona-fide TV trend. From cheery sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother and Parks and Recreation to dreary crime dramas like True DetectiveFargo, time, as the song says, keeps on slipping into the future. And while the time-jump gimmick is sometimes just that—a gimmick—it can be deployed deftly and artistically. Here’s a look at the various reasons the time jump has been deployed in recent TV history. What’s clear is that even though it works very well sometimes, like any TV trend, the time jump is in danger of wearing out its welcome.

BECAUSE IT’S OH-SO MYSTERIOUS

One of the most undeniably popular storytelling structures of the modern era is the mystery story. I don’t mean a Law & Order whodunit that even grandma can solve in under an hour. I mean a week-in, week-out bona-fide head scratcher that keeps audiences engaged. “How did Ted meet the mother and who the heck is she?” turned a gentle sitcom into a national obsession. Ditto for our collective fascination with True Detective, which presented one fairly basic mystery (Who is the Yellow King?, etc.), but hooked us all on the bigger mystery of “how did Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle go from sexy, clean-cut weirdo to ponytailed head case?”